pete plan

A first row with Radek. We launched at 6, took my double “Orca” on a lake that was relatively quiet, but not entirely without chop.

Pick Drills to warm up.

There was another double on the lake, who launched together with us. As they have been training together forever, and this was the first time in ages that Radek and I sit together, we turned a little earlier to avoid rowing next to them. Rowing next to them would probably have woken up our competitive spirits and would ruin what was supposed to be a good technique / steady state workout.

Did 2x12min, which is one lake length down, one lake length up. As we had turned early and the first leg was with tailwind, I ran out of lake with 15 seconds to go. Tant pis.

On the tailwind leg, the other double seemed to be slightly faster than we, rowing about 500m behind us. On the headwind leg, even though they were doing 26spm and we did 18spm, we had the same speed. Nice!

Then we did 4km of cooling down with technique drills.

“King of the mountain” followed by “Pimanov” (aka Top Quarter)

Pause after tap-down

Square blade rowing

I asked them how it went. They were happy that they had done a “steady state” 6km at 26spm. Interesting. When I do a 6km I count it as “hard distance”. May be just a nomenclature confusion.

A long day at work. I looked at the wind forecast and decided to not go rowing until 7pm.

That turned out very well. There was almost no wind and really flat water. Long Pete Plan intervals were on the menu and I decided to do 3km, 2.5km, 2km, the dreaded waterfall session.

I also wanted to pay attention to technique so I decided to let the stroke rate go with the flow. Feed the boat with a stroke when it asks for it.

As I am still not completely accomodated to good technique. It is still hard work for me. After the first set I was already tired, but technique wise it was good. I turned around and did the second one, happy with each 500m completed. Splits were bad, meters per stroke as well. Turned around for the last set, the 2km. Technique was better now. Consistently above 8.5m per stroke, but that was because I was doing a slightly lower stroke rate. In the last 500m I took it up to 30spm.

When I finished I almost needed to feed the fish … For a few moments I couldn’t do anything else but just sit on my single and breathe.

Time for the first 8x500m training of this season. I spent some time on Sunday to prepare the training plan between now and the next race, which will be a 1000m sprint on May 30. Time to get accustomed to the high stroke rates. My training being based on the Pete Plan, from now on I will push for short intervals rather than long intervals. I want to replace the “hard distance” with 1km or 2km efforts with long warming up and cooling down steady state.

I did the last OTW 8x500m a year ago, on 18 April 2014, achieving roughly 2:00 pace on average, roughly 28spm, in light wind (0.8m/s average). The temperature was 16 degrees C.

In June 2014, I did a 10x500m/500m rest which looked roughly like this:

Today’s session had to be early in the morning, because there is stronger wind predicted for the afternoon. So I pushed off at 6:18 which is early for me.

The weather was slightly different than a year ago. Average temperature during the session 3 degrees C, and a wind speed of 1.1 m/s. So colder and slightly stronger wind. My year old report doesn’t say anything about waves. Today there were some, and there was some varying wind. Rowing from Rokle (northwest corner of lake) to Sirka (south) I had both tailwind and headwind conditions.

And the overall summary:
dist_____|time_____|_pace___|_HR__|_SPM__|_DPS|comment
2059_____|_12:37____|_3:03.8|132|19.0|8.6|warmup
3998_____|_16:29____|_2:03.7|166|29.0|8.4|Main set
1006_____|_06:52____|_3:24.8|139|18.3|8.0|Cool down
3532_____|_20:58____|_2:58.1|149|19.0|8.9|rest meters
10595____|_56:56____|_2:41.2|149|21.1|8.8|_Total

Hm, so I am a bit slower at a bit higher pace, but at lower HR. Should I be worried that my hard days are too easy? Whatever the answer to that question is, this a good marker for the season, although I am wondering if I should keep the 8x500m / 3:00 rest format or switch to the 10x500m/500m format. I want to see the red next time1.

I can also happily report that I made some additional changes to my CrewNerd TCX spreadsheet and above summaries are now almost produced automatically. XGPS160 and CrewNerd were well behaved today. I did “swipe up” to completely switch off CrewNerd before the row, as Greg suggested.

Our traditional Spring Races of coming Saturday have become quite interesting. The elite will have control races in Prague for the national crew selection, so suddenly only the Masters rowers of the region are left behind in the open category. On my home lake. Interesting. Interesting.

Yesterday’s CTC was a 2k pace session (or slightly faster) but today I still wanted to do a 4x1km OTW at my envisioned race pace. I haven’t done a 4x1km OTE this year so I don’t even know what my reference pace is for this Pete Plan training, but I think it is about 2km pace. Perhaps slightly slower.

The weather was perfect. I launched at 6:30 pm and it was still 20 degrees C, there was a very mild wind from the north-northwest (2 m/s), which gradually disappeared during the training. I did the first 2 intervals with the very light tailwind or crosswind, the third interval with headwind or no wind, and the final interval with essentially no wind.

Today I stickered the boat name to our new double. I will keep it secret until Saturday’s christening ceremony.

In next week’s races, I agreed to race the double with Michal, so today we took the double out for a row. It was relatively flat water on the lake, for the first time in ages. I gave Michal the choice between a 3km/2.5km/2km or a steady state row. He chose the first one.

He has only started to train again recently. It showed. He became tired relatively quickly.

Still a good workout. In the first interval, the 3000m, we had to do a hard stop about a minute into the row, because a single had decided to turn and didn’t see us coming. We also had wake of three motor boats. Two coach launches and one motor boat with guys from the sailing club taking their kids for a ride. These were the worst, because they didn’t slow down for us and were basically doing circles on the lake.

Heavy day at work. We had the “regional” (Europe, Middle East, Africa and India) president of Honeywell visiting us and I had to present Advanced Tech to him. I think it worked out well but I found myself in my office at 4:30pm not able to do anything productive any more. Energy draining.

It was windy again and the lake was full of waves, so I decided to do the workout on the river part. More people had that idea. I ended up chasing, then being chased by our 16 year old single sculler and two pairs.

The workout was the Pete Plan Pyramid. I have a 2km race in a week and a half, so I thought a bit of 2k speed work would be appropriate:

Since I have my new wing rigger, I had the feeling my left scull has a slightly too large blade angle. Something was not feeling right and I felt that I ended up holding the left handle with a too tight grip. So on Monday I measured the oarlock angle and indeed found it to be at 5 degrees instead of 4. So I corrected.

During the first 750m I suddenly found myself wondering about my left oarlock again so I looked. To my horror I discovered something worse. The pin had come slightly lose and was wiggling slightly.

That made it hard to do the rest of the workout at full pressure.

On the other hand, I thought, I need to train not to dig too deep and too strong, so this would be good exercise. Still, one ends up a little insecure, so I was going at slightly slower stroke rates.

So after the training I spent some time tightening the pin, measuring the outboard and setting (back to were I started) the oarlock angle. Apparently, when I got my new wing and mounted the oarlocks, I didn’t tighten this one enough, and it started to work with the first row, slowly getting more and more wiggly …